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Darktable
Darktable is a powerful photo proofing and organising application, with a wide range of filter-based non-destructive digital darkroom tools. It is an ideal tool for professional or avid hobbyist photographers.
Strengths [Weaknesses]
Photo Management
Digital photography has left most people with thousands of photos that they never look at because they cannot begin to organise them all. Darktable is a sensible organisational environment. Yes, you could just organise photos in your file manager, but Darktable makes the act of organising also the act of proofing, so you can identify and highlight the good ones.
Non-Destructive Editing
Darktable creates a stack of filters through which you may view and export your images. Filters can be modified or removed independently of the source image and of one another.
Weaknesses [Strengths]
Complex
This is an application filled with advanced, professional-level photographic features, so it takes time to learn it entirely and to master it.
Non-Destructive Editing
The non-destructive, non-linear workflow is not for everyone. There are those who prefer to make a manual backup of an image, and then experiment with effects and hands-on bitmap tools. Darktable is not the best solution for that style of work.
Darktable takes a new approach to the digital darkroom paradigm. Digikam and
GIMP, for example, both make changes to the data that you load into them; when
you change the colour balance of a photograph, these applications re-write
pixels to reflect the change (assuming you save the image; otherwise it's done
in RAM only). If you want multiple versions of the same image, such as a colour
version of a photograph as well as a black-and-white version, then you must
copy the source data and maintain, literally, two files (or two layers in one
file, at best). Darktable uses filters only.
Think of Darktable as a lens that you place over a photograph; one filter might make a colour photograph black-and-white, while another might make the colours brighter and more vivid. One filter might sharpen an image and another might diffuse or blur it. In fact, a Darktable lens can also rotate or crop, balance colours, stylize, and much more.
Because the filters are filters, they do not change the source file itself. You can re-order the filters, modify their properties, remove a few, and so on, all without the need to undo the filters that you already applied.
Perhaps most importantly, the workflow is non-linear. The data from the source photo is exactly the same through the entire process, but viewed through the “lenses” of digital filters. You can add, remove, or re-order filters at any time during the process. In traditional pixel-based editors, you wouldn't be able to do that without a series of undo's.
There is a build script available on http://slackbuilds.org which should suit most people's needs.
See Also
Digikam
GIMP
Lightzone
Shotwell